Classic Camp's Classic Horror Emporium The Collection

Welcome to Classic Camp's Classic Horror Emporium, the short story and poetry collection. This is a collection of new and previously published short stories and poetry by yours truly, Bill "Classic" Camp. I will not bother to introduce myself here because my first several poems already do a fine job of that. Instead, I would like to use this space to inform you, the reader, where each of these pieces were originally published, and to tell you a little bit about the type of things I write. For short stories, I mainly write horror or least dark fiction. Even some of the general fiction works found here have allusions to horror. For poetry, I actually prefer to write nature poetry, but I do enjoy an occasional horror poem. With that, let's take a look at the works presented here.

This collection opens with a series of poems. "My Utopia" is a very personal previously unpublished poem about the house I lived in from birth to eight years old. The ghost story toward the end of the poem is a true story to the best of my memory. The next poem, "I Was Born to Write Horror," is a version of the biography I sometimes use for publications where my work appears, but in poetic form. The third poem in this collection, "Journey to College," I first penned while in an undergraduate creative writing class, and like many works in this collection, was first published in the publication Teach. Write. "Cormorant in a Nor'easter" was first published in the online literary magazine Lite Lit One, but since the publication has since closed, it is no longer available anywhere else but here. It is the first of many nature poems in this collection. The next two poems, "A Perfect Rainbow" and "After the Storm, Clouds Will Rise" were both also published in Teach. Write. The next two poems, "If There Is No God" and "Paisley" are both previously unpublished, the latter of which, "Paisley" actually being a joke song I wrote in high school, where I was the lead singer of an attic rock band.

That rounds out the poetry section and leads us to the short story section of this collection. The first, "Paranormal Experiment," was my first published short story and first appeared in the magazine parABnormal Digest. It was also republished in several publications for Tales of Wonder and Dread publications, starting with Dark Dreams and Weird Worlds: A Collection of Science Fiction and Horror Stories. "Shadows in the Corner" was also first published in Dark Dreams and Weird Worlds. It and "Paranormal Experiment" were my first attempts at flash fiction, but both wound up over 1,000 words. "The Gargoyle Chair" and "The Moth and the Werewolf" are both previously unpublished. "Cats" is a poem originally written in that same creative class in college and was published in New Author's Journal. I placed it here because it makes a good companion piece with "An Unlucky Day" (first published on the Page and Spine website) since they are both about cats. "The Lecturer" was also first published on the website Page and Spine and was one of the first items published on their Out of this World section of the site. "The House of Vergosi" was my first self-published work and is available on Amazon. "The Sorcerer" was also first published in Dark Dreams and Weird Worlds and is a segment from my first completed novel-length manuscript of the same name. "A Night at the Movies" and "The Bar Scene" were both first published in Teach.Write. "The Physicist's Triangle" was also first published on Page & Spine's website. Finally, the flash fiction piece, "The Beast of Frisco Bay" and the poem "Imagination Lost" are original works unpublished elsewhere as was the short story "A Prophet in Angora." I finished off this collection with an essay about how I put my stories together titled "How I Write."

I hope you will enjoy this collection and get as much fun out of reading it as I had in writing each of these works.